Marcus Troyka posted...
DepressionII?
Most definitely. In fact we’re already well on our way there. To understand why you
first have to understand how the original Great Depression occurred. Before 1913 the
US was on the gold standard. Banks would take your gold and give you bank notes in
return. If you put your money in a savings account they would create bank notes from
that and lend it out or invest it in the stock market, paying you interest in return.
Then the Federal Reserve was created. The Federal Reserve is a banking cartel. They
said to the banks, “now you can lend out as many bank notes as you want, we’ve got
your back”. At first the banks were wary of doing anything risky. To a banker their
bank is their life, and if it goes in the toilet they’d find themselves shirtless
and living in a homeless shelter somewhere. However starting around 1920 the banks
began to take the bait. They started creating bank notes for gold that they didn’t
actually have, and lending them out and investing them in the stock market.
This drove up stock prices greatly. Everyone rejoiced at how great the economy was
and how a new age of permanent prosperity was upon them. Everyone could get cheap
credit and use it to buy superfluous junk. However the banks also had to pay back
their depositors the gold that was lent to them. Every bank note they printed that
wasn’t backed by gold was thus leverage, or in other words ‘borrowed’ money. The
more leverage the banks took on the fewer the losses it would take to wipe out their
entire store of real gold, and many banks had insane leverage ratios. The more
leverage they racked up the more cautious they became about adding more leverage.
And then stocks began to falter. As banks became more cautious the relentless upward
drive of stock prices came to a halt. Then they started to fall. For the most heavily
leveraged banks that was all it took to cause them to go bankrupt, and when they went
bankrupt they had to sell off all their assets to pay their debts. The selloffs of
course drove prices further downward, forcing other banks to fold in a chain reaction
all the way to the bottom. Now at that point they should have just been honest and cut
their losses. In other words, they should have admitted that they didn’t have the gold
that they were pretending to have, and just redeemed their notes based on the amount
of gold that the actually had. However that’s not what they did. Instead, under the
misguidance of Hoover, they tried to reclaim as many bank notes as they could to try
to restore the original value. This only served to make things worse. Since money kept
being pulled out of the economy prices couldn’t stabilize and businesses were unable
to recover. Then Roosevelt came along and took advantage of this to blame the Federal
Reserve for not printing enough money to deal with the crisis! By diverting people’s
attention from the real cause of the Depression he managed to ensure that the same
crooked practices that caused it would not only be repeated again, but even be
encouraged by the very people who were robbed by them.
Fast forward a couple of decades...
In 1971 the US dropped the gold standard completely. People had long since forgotten
why they needed it in the first place. Now the banks can create as much money as they
want, with the Federal Reserve backing them up with their crooked schemes. Stock
prices get driven up to bizarro world levels, people are burdened with huge amounts
of debt that’s issued using money that the banks don’t actually have, and thanks to
all of this it’s no longer possible for a family to survive on a single paycheck
anymore. We’ve already seen numerous economic bubbles and crashes, in 1987, in 2001,
in 2008, and now in 2018, with each crisis being worse than the one before it. Also
thanks to the money-printing madness, Corporations in the 80s went on a rampage buying
out other corporations (using borrowed money, of course) until only a handful of
corporations now own virtually the entire US economy. Money is funneled out of the
hands of the lower and middle classes and into the hands of the rich, government
sponsored monopolists, who thanks to the mega-corporations can freely buy all of
the politicians before the voters even cast a ballot. It’s also given the government
an excuse to raise taxes. The government taxes more things and at a higher rate than
it ever did prior to 1913. The income tax didn’t even exist before then. The government
spends over 60% of its budget on social welfare programs that nobody even needed before
the Great Depression, and does so through deficit spending putting the country into debt
far beyond what it can ever actually pay back. Social security and government pensions
are a complete scam. Those programs take the money that’s paid into them and spend it
immediately. They replace it with treasury bonds, mere IOUs that the government makes
to itself and which can only be paid through future taxes, at a time when the government
is spending more money than it collects. The scheme is literally funded by less than
nothing. Neither democracy nor capitalism truly exist in the US anymore thanks to all
of this. People are getting poorer by the day and pointing their fingers at all the
wrong places looking for the cause, and voting for all the wrong solutions, which in
reality will only make them poorer.
In short, the future of the US looks like this:
- Jewed
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